The blindness of the ‘wise’
A group of the UK’s leading economist have just written to the Chancellor saying his Plan A needs a Plan B. These wise men and women feel that the only problem with finding a return to growth is in the details of a ‘growth strategy’. Sadly these ‘wise’ people are as wrong as Osborne in...
Today’s flourishing enterprises should focus on wellbeing rather than growth
When I run sessions with business executives on growth, wellbeing, and innovation, I say that people don’t have to buy my analysis of the problem to buy my ideas on the solution. That’s because I think we are now living in an era of “uneconomic growth” and we therefore have no choice but to redefine...
Millennium Consumption Goals
I really like the idea of Millennium Consumption Goals. Instead of fixating on what needs to happen in the developing world through the (failing) Millennium Development Goals, what about us in the rich world fessing up to our role in inequality and over-use?
Davos’s Citizen Renaissance
A new report The Consumption Dilemma launched by the WEF last week in Davos has an interesting section talking about the shifts from ‘consumer’ to ‘citizen’ which we first discussed in Citizen Renaissance. The report quotes Citizen Renaissance co-author Robert saying “We are sensing a return to citizen, rather than consumer, values – proof positive that it is...
Small society, Big Bang
As Professor Tim Jackson says in his TED talk we live in times where we “spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.” As we have written in Citizen Renaissance, our hyper-consumerist lifestyles are fueled by unsustainable credit-bubble, debt-based growth which...
Only greed can save us?
I just read a tweet by someone who follows me on Twitter, via Solitaire Townsend, on a piece by New Scientist’s environment correspondent Fred Pearce which suggests that greed will save us from the impending perfect storm.
Big Society through the crystal ball
Great Edelman event this week all about the Big Society. Nick Hurd MP explained his view of what Big Society actually means. Peter Oborne journo'ed it out with Kevin Maguire while the other two panellists - Greenpeace's John Sauven and London 2012 Chair John Armitt CBE - both provided interesting perspectives.
Cameron’s Happiness Index is welcome news for progressives
The government has announced a wellbeing review. What might this mean and why is this an important and welcome sign of progressiveness? In conventional wisdom, economic growth and higher incomes mean richer lives and improved quality of life. But, as the Happy Planet Index shows, true prosperity goes beyond material pleasures.
The coalition’s economic blind spot
Critics of Blair’s suggest that one of his faults was his keenness for neoliberal free-market economics in which corporations and the rich got richer at the expense of people and the planet. But where is the coalition on this? Read the Orange book and you can’t help but hear Thatcher’s voice muttering agreement in the...
